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Multimedia streaming applications with stringent QoS requirements in 60 GHz mmWave wireless personal area networks (WPANs) demand high rate and low latency data transfer as well as little service disruption. In this paper, we consider the problem of robust relay placement in 60 GHz WPANs with directional antenna. Relays forward traffic from transmitter devices to receiver devices facilitating i ) the primary communication path for non-line-of-sight (NLOS) transceiver pairs, and ii ) secondary (backup) communication path for line-of-sight (LOS) or NLOS transceiver pairs. By incorporating a classic directional antenna model and characterizing the link contention, we formulate the robust minimum relay placement problem and the robust maximum utility relay placement problem with the objective to minimize the number of relays deployed and maximize the network utility, respectively. Efficient algorithms are developed to solve both problems and have been shown to incur less service disruption in presence of moving subjects that may block the LOS paths in the environment.

ZigBee and other wireless technologies operating in the (2.4GHz) ISM band are being applied in Wireless Personal Area Networks (WPAN) for many medical applications. However, these low duty cycle, low power, and low data rate medical WPANs suffer from WiFi co-channel interferences. WiFi interference can lead to longer latency and higher packet losses in WPANs, which can be particularly harmful to safety-critical applications with stringent temporal requirements, such as ElectroCardioGraphy (ECG). This paper exploits the Clear Channel Assessment (CCA) mechanism in WiFi devices and proposes a novel policing framework, WiCop, that can effectively control the temporal white-spaces between WiFi transmissions. Such temporal white-spaces can be utilized for delivering low duty cycle WPAN traffic. We have implemented and validated WiCop on SORA, a software-defined radio platform. Experimental results show that with the assistance of the proposed WiCop policing schemes, the packet reception rate of a ZigBee-based WPAN can increase by up to 116% in the presence of a heavy WiFi interferer. A case study on the medical application of WPAN ECG monitoring demonstrates that WiCop can bound ECG signal distortion within 2% even under heavy WiFi interference. An analytical framework is devised to model the CCA behavior of WiFi interferers and the performance of WPANs under WiFi interference with or without WiCop protection. The analytical results are corroborated by experiments.

Spectrum sensing receives much attention recently in the cognitive radio (CR) network research, i.e., secondary users (SUs) constantly monitor channel condition to detect the presence of the primary users (PUs). In this paper, we go beyond spectrum sensing and introduce the PU separation problem, which concerns with the issues of distinguishing and characterizing PUs in the context of collaborative spectrum sensing and monitor selection. The observations of monitors are modeled as boolean OR mixtures of underlying binary sources for PUs. We first justify the use of the binary OR mixture model as opposed to the traditional linear mixture model through simulation studies. Then we devise a novel binary inference algorithm for PU separation. Not only PU-SU relationship are revealed, but PUs' transmission statistics and activities at each time slot can also be inferred. Simulation results show that without any prior knowledge regarding PUs' activities, the algorithm achieves high inference accuracy even in the presence of noisy measurements., Submitted to the IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications on Nov. 2010